Hillary opposes TPP but yet it hasn't be removed from the platform? Even after a mass push and plea from Bernie to do so?

In before Obama would take it as an insult.

Pick a VP who was gun ho for it up until a few days ago, a presidential nominee who called th gold standard several months ago and it remains on the platform -- but yes, we should wholeheartedly believe it won't get past the floor.

Not even anti TPP -- just have to sigh on how much team Clinton is willing to bullshit on this.

"An acquaintance from my days in the Clinton administration, who has been advising Hillary, phoned this morning. "

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Obama? What are you talking about??

And LOL at believing that Hillary opposes the TPP, there's a reason why Bernie couldn't get it abolished last week when he joined up with the rest of the party unlike the $15 minimum wage thing where they budged somewhat.

You can't really come out against something that openly and then turn around on it. For better or worse, she's stuck here. While the TPP itself is pretty insignificant (and the idea that it's a big political issue is dumb--plus most voters with an opinion on it favor it), this is a bad way to make decisions.

From the rhetoric of proponents of the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), a sweeping trade and investment pact between the U.S. and 11 Asia-Pacific countries, it would be easy to conclude that the agreement is an economic panacea for the shrinking middle class and stagnant wages faced by most workers in America. The reality is more sobering: There are good economic reasons to believe that TPP will not only fail to provide the promised benefits but actually make things worse.

Yes, economic gains can be found through trade liberalization where trade barriers are high, but tariffs are already low (just 2.7 percent on average between TPP member countries). Put this minuscule number next to the surging U.S. dollar, up 26 percent since July 2011. A more expensive dollar makes imports cheaper and exports less competitive in foreign markets. The exchange rate change swamps the benefits from the small reduction in tariffs. And the toothless side declaration on exchange rate misalignments by TPP finance ministers is likely to be as ineffective as current diplomatic efforts to rebalance exchange rates.

While the U.S. Trade Representative boasts of 18,000 tariff cuts for American exporters, the economic significance of many of these to U.S. producers and workers appears negligible. For example, tropical, impoverished Vietnam will eliminate tariffs on skis, snowplows, and caviar, while predominantly Muslim Brunei and Malaysia will eliminate tariffs on pork. In fact, in more than half of the 18,000 categories, the U.S. exported nothing to TPP nations last year; for many of the remaining 7,500 categories, American exporters sold only small amounts. These are areas where American producers are unlikely to develop a comparative advantage.

With trade barriers already so low, it is no wonder that existing modeling analyses from economists at the Peterson Institute and the World Bank show such negligible benefits from eliminating trade barriers in TPP. Both find that gains to the U.S. economy will be less than the statistical error when the Commerce Department calculates our GDP figures. A study by the Economic Research Service found that TPP would have zero effect on U.S. GDP.

Even these estimates should be taken with a grain of salt: The models assume that trade will be balanced and no unemployment will ensue. Models incorporating more realistic assumptions, like those from economists at Tufts University, find a net GDP loss for the United States from TPP.

We know that imports displace U.S. jobs while exports create them. But even if trade grew in balance, there is reason to expect the U.S. would shed more jobs in the labor-intensive industries hit by import competition than it would gain in the capital-intensive industries where U.S. exports may expand, causing net unemployment to rise. Empiricalresearch, as opposed to simulations in theoretical models, shows that import surges result in significant job dislocations and wage declines in the U.S.—not just for those directly affected, but across entire regional economies as demand falls and more workers compete for lower-quality jobs.

Past experience gives no reason to believe new agreements will help balance trade, bringing our exports more in line with out imports. For example, the U.S. International Trade Commission predicted that the U.S.–Korea free trade agreement, implemented in 2012, would narrow the $13 billion U.S. trade deficit with Korea by $4 billion. Instead, in the most recent 12-month period, the trade deficit with Korea expanded to more than $29 billion.

The most significant parts of the TPP pertain to investment, not trade. But these investment provisions make it more attractive for American businesses to move jobs and production offshore and give greater credibility to the offshoring threats employers use to undercut U.S. workers’ demands for higher wages and unions.

It is possible to write a trade agreement that is fair to workers and provides broadly shared benefits for all Americans. But when people other than those representing the interests of big businesses are shut out of writing the rules of the economy, that outcome is unlikely.

She publicly opposes it. If we're entertaining conspiracy theories, then we can start talking about how actually has offshore laborers and endlessly speculate on his "true" intent is contradicting his formally, publicly adopted position.

And LOL at believing that Hillary opposes the TPP, there's a reason why Bernie couldn't get it abolished last week when he joined up with the rest of the party unlike the $15 minimum wage thing where they budged somewhat.

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Clinton isn't in charge of the DNC or the Democratic platform. That platform is maintained by their drafting committee. Obama, as the sitting President, and current leader of the Democratic Party, wields far more direct influence over this platform than Hillary Clinton.

She publicly opposes it. If we're entertaining conspiracy theories, then we can start talking about how actually has offshore laborers and endlessly speculate on his "true" intent is contradicting his formally, publicly adopted position.

Clinton isn't in charge of the DNC or the Democratic platform. That platform is maintained by their drafting committee. Obama, as the sitting President, and current leader of the Democratic Party, wields far more direct influence over this platform than Hillary Clinton.

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What you are doing here is ironically spinning... From bringing up the McAuliffe article to now spinning to Obama and the DNC(Already twice now with Obama)

You know Obama's going to be gone soon.. So tell me how Hillary, the democratic nominee will have no influence on it?

Publicly opposing it well Obama himself promotes it seems like a conflict of interest. So I'm not so sure why you believe her so called "stance."

I think this conversation with Robert Reich I posted sheds some good light on it.

Robert B. Reich: Does Hillary get it?
Tribune Content Agency
American Voices 2 days ago

Does Hillary Clinton understand that the biggest divide in American politics is no longer between the right and the left, but between the anti-establishment and the establishment?

I worry she doesn't -- at least not yet.

A Democratic operative I've known since the Bill Clinton administration tells me, "Now that she's won the nomination, Hillary is moving to the middle. She's going after moderate swing voters."

Presumably that's why she tapped Tim Kaine to be her vice president. Kaine is as vanilla middle as you can get.

In fairness, Hillary is only doing what she knows best. Moving to the putative center is what Bill Clinton did after the Democrats lost the House and Senate in 1994 -- signing legislation on welfare reform, crime, trade and financial deregulation that enabled him to win re-election in 1996 and declare "the era of big government" over.

In those days a general election was like a competition between two hot dog vendors on a boardwalk extending from right to left. Each had to move to the middle to maximize sales. If one strayed too far left or right, the other would move beside him and take all sales on the rest of the boardwalk.

But this view is outdated. Nowadays, it's the boardwalk versus the private jets on their way to the Hamptons.

The most powerful force in American politics today is anti-establishment fury at a system rigged by big corporations, Wall Street and the super-wealthy. This is a big reason that Donald Trump won the Republican nomination. It's also why Bernie Sanders took 22 states in the Democratic primaries, including a majority of Democratic primary voters under age 45.

There are no longer "moderates." There's no longer a "center." There's authoritarian populism (Trump) and democratic populism (which had been Bernie's "political revolution" and is now up for grabs).

And then there's the Republican establishment (now scattered to the winds) and the Democratic establishment.

If Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party don't recognize this realignment, they're in for a rude shock -- as, I'm afraid, is the nation. Trump does recognize it. His authoritarian populism ("I am your voice") is premised on it.

"In five, 10 years from now," Trump says, "you're going to have a worker's party. A party of people that haven't had a real wage increase in 18 years, that are angry."

Speaking at a factory in Pennsylvania in June, Trump decried politicians and financiers who had betrayed Americans by "taking away from the people their means of making a living and supporting their families."

Worries about free trade used to be confined to the political left. Now, according to the Pew Research Center, people who say free-trade deals are bad for America are more likely to lean Republican.

The problem isn't trade itself. It's a political-economic system that won't cushion working people against trade's downsides or share trade's upsides. In other words, a system that's rigged.

Most basically, the anti-establishment wants big money out of politics. This was the premise of Sanders' campaign. It's also been central to Donald ("I'm so rich I can't be bought off") Trump's appeal, although he's now trolling for big money.

A recent YouGov/Economist poll found that 80 percent of GOP primary voters who preferred Trump as the nominee listed money in politics as an important issue, and a Bloomberg Politics poll shows a similar percentage of Republicans opposed to the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United v. FEC decision.

Getting big money out of politics is of growing importance to voters in both major parties. A June New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 84 percent of Democrats and 81 percent of Republicans want to fundamentally change or completely rebuild our campaign finance system.

Last January, a Des Moines Register poll of likely Iowa caucus-goers found 91 percent of Republicans and 94 percent of Democrats unsatisfied or "mad as hell" about money in politics.

Hillary Clinton doesn't need to move toward the "middle." In fact, such a move could hurt her if it's perceived to be compromising the stances she took in the primaries in order to be more acceptable to Democratic movers and shakers.

She needs to move instead toward the anti-establishment -- forcefully committing herself to getting big money out of politics, and making the system work for the many rather than a privileged few.